Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Business analytics (BA) refers to the iterative methodical exploration of an enterprise's data; e.g., using statistical analysis and forecasting tools. BA facilitates data-driven decision making, providing insight that may inform business decisions and can be used to automate and optimize business processes. Enterprise data is required to support the analysis. Acquisition of enterprise data often involves extraction from one or more business systems, cleansing, and integration into a single repository such as a data warehouse, and in particular data marts for specific uses of the enterprise data.
Multidimensional data models for analytic applications are typically represented on a classic relational database management system (RDBMS) such as star schemas. Designing, developing and maintaining a proper star schema implementation is one of the most challenging tasks for BA. A bad design may have direct negative impact on data load and query performance. However, modern in-memory databases, such as the SAP® HANA computing platform, raise the question whether the strong link between logical multidimensional data models and a given database implementation such as a star schema still holds.